DISQUS

I never got a chance to hear Bill in person; however I am a fan of his verbal delivery and presentation skills. If you took some pictures of the secret service men, I wonder if they would have questioned or approached you? Most definitely if you were a 5'8 brunette.

I ran into a similar problem with a client. Their current infrastructure requires a redirect, and it is done ethically and inline with Google's guidelines. It would be very costly to remedy this situation, and their rankings have not been affected thus far. However, the developer put a div tag on the redirect page with "display=none" and provided text that was not being displayed on the screen. Google says "why have text, if the user cannot read it?" The client insisted that the redirect page stay completely white, and refused to put the text in correctly. To make a long story short; the client received an email from Google and was removed from the index 3 days later. After 9 days of emails, and phone calls to Google employees, I was able to get them back into the index. They sustained their rankings and ironically improved in some regards. The bottom line is text is meant to be read by the user, and any attempt to disguise or hide the text is considered unethical practice by Google and the other top tier engines. Don't expect to get back into the index as fast as I did for my client. I luckily got in touch with someone that had a connection with the engineers. Normally it can take weeks or months to be reincluded in the index.

Oh how I agree......As a web designer, I have to test on multiple browsers to make sure that all elements on the page are displayed properly across multiple browser platforms. I constantly notice that IE can "figure" out the code's intentions and properly display the image or element correctly. However, on the other hand, FireFox has a tough time parsing the code and translating it correctly on the screen, especially if there are errors in the code. Typical errors that affect the browsers are open tags, and erroneous code. I also recommend validating your code here: http://validator.w3.org/

Amazon, Toys R Us, Kids R Us and several other household brand names are running on the same infrastructure. I noticed similar problems on Amazon and Toys R Us during the '05 holiday season. I also noticed that Toysrus.com lives on the Amazon domain which would explain the shared network problems. You would think these well know fortune 500 companies would implement a professional and reliable infrastructure, on isolated domains and servers.

What a joke...circuit city is spending a significant amount of their PPC budget on branded terms. I wonder who would be competing with them to drive the price up so high. Unless they are just paying that premium price to lock down that term...Regardless they can utilize the brand management guidelines set forth by the engines to ensure competitors do not use their trademarked name as a target key phrase. Mortgage terms are still on the rise, and we don't expect their CPC to lower any time soon.

As of January 20th, there has not been a Toolbar PageRank export for 93 days. The longest time between toolbar PR exports was 111 days. It must be coming any day now. I have seen some of my client's PR carry over to newly developed pages that went live within the last 2 weeks. However, I have not noticed an increase (or decrease for that matter). This website provides a detailed list of Google PR, Directory, and back-link updates organized by dates. http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-upd...